What do we know about insect responses to global change? A review of meta-analyses on global change drivers
Data files
May 16, 2025 version files 146.33 KB
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Global_change_meta-analyses_data_cleaned.xlsx
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README.md
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Abstract
Global change is causing major declines in biodiversity, especially of insects. Scientific interest in global change impacts on insects has increased in recent years, resulting in many different meta-analyses examining questions within this topic.
We performed a comprehensive review of meta-analyses examining effects of global change stressors on insects to identify well-studied questions and gaps in our knowledge and synthesize responses of insects to those stressors. We identified 75 meta-analyses that fit our scope, accounting for 905 meta-results, and spanning 18 global change stressors.
Our synthesis identified several global change stressors that are relatively well-studied across insect groups, such as agriculture, habitat degradation, and pesticide use. Moreover, other global change stressors were found to be relatively less-studied, highlighting areas that need more attention; for example, very few meta-analyses considered the impacts of global warming, ozone, light pollution, and interactive effects of multiple stressors on insects.
Most stressors are more associated with negative than positive effects on insects, except for nutrient addition, ozone, and air pollution. Negative effects accounted for the large majority of consequences on reproduction responses, which may help explain recent insect declines. Additionally, we found evidence for higher trophic levels being more negatively affected by global change, and insects in aquatic habitats experiencing fewer negative responses to stressors.
Given these largely negative impacts of global change on insects, we argue for the need for national and local policy actions to monitor and actively conserve insect communities.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.cjsxksnhr
Description of the data and file structure
We performed a literature search for meta-analyses studying the effects of global change on insects. We extracted data from these meta-analyses to perform a vote-count type of analysis.
Files and variables
File: Global_change_meta-analyses_data_cleaned.xlsx
Description: Dataset with data used in the paper.
Variables
- Entry: Unique identifier for each entry
- Paper#: Unique identifier of the paper
- Author: Author name
- Year: Year of publication
- AuthorYear: combined author and year
- DOI: DOI of paper
- Global change driver single/multiple: if the global change driver studies is a single driver or multiple drivers.
- Global change drivers: specify the global change driver
- Geographic region: region at which they restricted their review - e.g. global, or North America, western hemisphere etc.
- studies in EU and US: Percent of studies that were from the North America/EU. NA = information was not possible to extract from the paper.
- filtered by English: Does the review only include papers published in English? (Y/N)
- Number of total papers included: Number of papers (not cases) included in the review or meta-analysis
- Lab/Field/Mixed: did the meta-analysis review literature that was all in the Field? Lab? or was it Mixed between the two?
- Review of all insects: did they review all insecta (Y) or did they restrict taxonomical/functional (N)
- Type of Restriction: Taxonomic or functional restriction?More than Arthropod, Arthropod (>50% insect), or Insect (only Insects included), was the study only on Pollinators or soil Insects for example.
- Type of Restriction_cleaned: column 'Type of Restriction' cleaned by removing redundant information (e.g., insect or arthropod is not a restriction)
- Coded from: which figure or table or text page we got the data from.
- Type of group: taxonomic, habitat, functional - IF there is no division by taxonomic, habitat, or functional group, then we discard/do not enter the data. Include 'overall' if they are divided into subcategories, 'multiple' when there are multiple response variables/groups combined but not teased apart.
- Groups Studied: Functional: herbivores, detritivores, predators, parasitoids, omnivore, pollinator etc., Taxonomic: Leps, Orthops, etc., Habitat: grassland, forest, aquatic.
- Groups Studied_simplified: removed redundancies from column 'Group Studied'
- individual/population/community: heirarchical level of study: Must be individual, population, or community response.
- Response: what are the authors were measuring (e.g., physiology, phenology, behavior change, abundance, richness, diversity, etc).
- Response cleaned: removed redundancies from column 'Response'
- # cases: how many cases included in this response measure, NA if not known
- Direction of results: positive, negative, null for their effect size for this response variable where the treatment is the global change (e.g. if abundance goes down with fire, then direction of results is negative compared to the control w/ no global change).
- Notes: any relevant notes.